Monday, October 13, 2014

“These hoes
ain’t loyal.” I wake up too many mornings with the hook playing in my head. Here’s
the kicker: I hate this song! And yet I can’t get it out of my head right now because
it’s stuck on repeat. This happens every time I’m somewhere the song plays. I
like the beat and I don’t want to because I can’t stand songs with misogynistic
lyrics. So, the fact that this song won’t leave me alone, means that I need to
write about it. I need to explain why I detest this and similar songs that
treat women as things. A hoe is a thing; it’s an object. It is a tool to be
used. It is easily discarded and replaced. So, when we sing along to the catchy
beat, we subconsciously accept that women and girls are things. We accept that they
are disposable.And we don’t recognize
their humanity.

When we sing along, we can go along with Jamal
Bryant, pastor of Empowerment Temple in Baltimore, MD who was speaking to
his congregation back in June about cheating men, and talked about the other
woman and said, “These hoes ain’t loyal.”I listened to the entire sermon so as
not to be sucked into a sensationalized news story because I know how things
can be taken out of context. But this was not the case. His sexist, homophobic,
misogynistic sermon made references to “sanctified sissies” and “baby mamas”,
too. So the song lyrics fit right in with the rest of the foolishness.

When we sing along, we are not offended by the pastor’s
remarks. We are members of the congregation clapping and standing up in agreement.We are mostly African-American women being
bamboozled and hoodwinked by the words of a charismatic preacher who is once
again blaming women for the downfall of men. What’s even more interesting in
this scenario is Bryant chose to use this particular song to chastise women for
not being loyal when his marriage ended due to his infidelity in 2013. He was calling women out in the sermon when
he was the one who stepped out on his wife.

When we sing along, we can accept that three
professional African-American women hanging out at a hotel in Manhattan
couldn’t have been anything other than professional hookers. On August 28,
three friends: Kanataki Washington, Cydney Madlock and J. Lyn Thomas were
seated in a restaurant in the Standard Hotel in Manhattan when an
African-American man introduced himself and offered to buy the women drinks. But
before they could take him up on his offer, a security guard whispered in the
man’s ear and ushered him away. Washington said the security guard told them,
“Come on ladies. You can buy a drink, but you can’t be soliciting.”

The security guard insisted that the women were soliciting
sex. And when the women reported the security officer, they were met with
indifference, and told that security personnel were hire through an outside
agency. But a few weeks later, Washington says she received an email from a
staff member of the hotel inviting Washington and her friends back for a dinner
(valued at $400) and a bottle of champagne. None of the emails addressed the
women’s prostitution claim, but the hotel was willing to pay them to come back
which was a slap in the face. The hotel was okay with paying the women for
being insulted, but wouldn’t acknowledge the insult.

When we sing along, we accept two teens
found dead and bound together along a road in Duval County, Florida as par
for the course. Angela Mangum and Tjhisha Ball were best friends according to
their family members, and both the girls had been working as strippers at the
time of their deaths. Law enforcement officers in Jacksonville, Florida are
looking for tips, but the story has gotten little media attention. In the few
news outlets that I’ve seen the story reported, the pictures that are shown are
mug shots of the women who were arrested but never convicted of any crime.

When we sing along, we see these pictures as confirmation
that “these hoes ain’t loyal” and deserved to die. We don’t see them as victims
because we like our victims clean; we like them White; we like them right
according to a strict code of conduct that says bad girls can’t do good, and
good girls aren’t bad. So, that there is a killer(s) on the loose, does not
hold our attention. We flip the page or scroll onto the next news story if we
have even seen this news story at all.

When we sing along, we don’t raise an eyebrow when we learn
that a police officer targeted African-American women and sexually assaulted
them. Daniel
Holtzclaw, a 27 year-old officer with the Oklahoma police department preyed
on middle-aged Black women. Eight women have come forth since February of this
year complaining that they were pulled over during traffic stops and fondled,
ordered to perform oral sex and even one women accused Holtzclaw of rape. He
was arrested August 20. His bond, originally set at $5 million dollars was
reduced to $500,000 and Holtzclaw has been released from jail and placed under
house arrest. Across the nation we are protesting police brutality and
excessive force. And yet we are quiet around this decades old issue of police
officers abusing their power and assaulting Black women.

When we sing along, we are not outraged that a mother of
three lost her life just this month for not responding to a man trying to get
her phone number. Mary
“Unique” Spears was leaving the repast of a family member, when a man
started harassing her. He wanted to know if she was single, and if he could get
her number. He was persistent, and when Spears’ boyfriend tried to intercede on
her behalf, the man took out a gun and began shooting. He shot Spears once, and
when she tried to run he shot her twice more.

When we sing along, the seeds of misogyny take root in our
mind and become entangled with rational thought. So even when we clean up the
lyrics and sing, “these girls ain’t loyal”, we know that the girls in this and
songs like it are still tools of a trade designed to degrade and devalue females
in general but African-American women
and girls in particular who society consistently classifies as hoes and treats
as such.

So, think about that the next time you find yourself bobbing
and singing to Loyal.

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Booty, booty,
booty, booty, booty everywhere—and I’m over it. I am sick of the fascination
with big booty White girls. And no, I am not a hater.I have a bodacious backside of my own. But
what gives this big booty girl a wedgie the size of an extra-small thong is the
current media saturation of protruding posteriors of White girls as if it’s the
best thing since peanut butter found jelly. Big booties ain’t new!Big booty Black girls have been holding it
down since the beginning of time.

Women of African
descent have always had backsides that didn’t conform to the norm, and outside
of our communities we have been ridiculed and scorned and encouraged to cover
and camouflage our butts. Growing up, our mothers and grandmothers sang the
praises of the Almighty Girdle as the fix-all to control and contain our
God-given bottoms. They knew what we had, and they knew the trouble it could
cause so they encouraged us to bind our behinds while the men folk encouraged
us to strut our stuff. I think the art of switching (walking while swaying the
hips) originated and was perfected in the Black community by a Black woman with
a basketball booty who wanted to make sure its grace and movement was
appreciated by those lucky enough to behold it.

In the days before
music videos and social media, many
of us reveled in our bootylisciousness. I’m not bragging when I say, the booty songs
back in the day, Da Butt, Baby Got Back and Bootyliscious to name a few were definitely Black girl anthems. We
had one asset that we could call our own. We may not have had White girls
bouncing and behaving hair, or their any-other-color-than-brown eyes, but we
definitely had more junk in the trunk. And any Black girl worth her ethnicity
did not want to hear the words, “You got a White girl (aka pancake flat)
booty!”

And we reigned
booty supreme, until the 90s when a Latina by the name of Jennifer Lopez strolled
on the scene, and all eyes were on this petite dynamo’s terrific tush. It was a
terrible day for Black women because once again some other non-Black woman was
getting credit denied to us. Yes, JLo is a woman of color which should have
lessened the blow, but it didn’t really because for as long as we know, we’ve
been made to feel bad about our otherness—the differences that set us apart
from the dominant culture--and then along comes a Latina who could easily pass
for White and gets credit for an asset that was once black.

Jennifer was rear
ended by Beyonce who has made a name for herself in the derrière department.
And if that isn’t enough to let you know who’s on top in the best bottom
category, there is one of our own seated in the White House, and as ridiculous
as it may seem, First Lady Michelle Obama’s booty has been deemed newsworthy
(like everything else about the Obama family) a few times. We could finally
have pride in our backsides! But. . . not really. When Salon writer Erin Aubre
praised the attributes of Michelle’s gluteus maximus, it stirred up quite a
debate. So, much in fact that the Huffington Post posed the question if
was appropriate to talk about Michelle’s butt.Readers weighed in on the taboo topic of the First Lady’s tush.

We couldn’t talk
about Michelle’s booty, but hey, we had Bey. Things were going well until
Beyonce was butted by none other than Kim Kardashian who has one of the most
admired and envied celebrity backsides. Every time I turned around there was
someone talking about Kim’s butt. When Kim came on the scene, big booties,
moved mainstream. Then Nicki Minaj took over Kim’s number one spot. There are
Top 10 celebrity lists for everything, and when I looked up best booties, Nicki
and Kim are holding the number 1 and number 2 spots respectively. But what got
my panties in a bunch is that Black women, the originator of the ba dunka dunk,
the junk in the mid-sized to large trunk only had two spots out of ten. Really?We had been robbed—again.

First it was Bo Derek who made braids all the
rage. Hello? How long have we been wearing our hair braided? Some of us have
even been terminated for wearing braids branded as “too ethnic”. Then it was
Angelina Jolie’s pouty lips. Full lips were so much in vogue, that women
started getting injections to make their lips bigger—oops!—I mean fuller.
Because big lips were what Black women had before luscious lips became popular
and then “big lips” became “full lips” (because full sounds better than big)
and then Black women were able to stop using make-up tricks we had been taught
to minimize the size of our lips.

Hip-hip music
videos brought the booty into the spotlight, but it was still not socially
acceptable. Women who chose to flaunt their fabulous fannies were judged
harshly—until now! What music videos fetishized and objectified, society has
now normalized—if the booty in question happens to be alabaster in complexion. Nicki was recently criticized for her Anaconda
album cover. But Kim, the married mother of a young daughter and the queen of
bootie selfies gets a pass? I haven’t seen any open letters to Kim about
showing her ass.

From squats to
injections, to articles and videos galore, there is a surplus of information on
how to get a bigger butt. And now big booties are not only acceptable, they’re coveted.
I guess we should thank White girls for giving our derrières their due just as
we have Miley Cyrus to thank for legitimatizing twerking. Side eye. I’m so over
this latest episode of cultural appropriation. There is even a documentary, Bottoms
Up—Rise of the Backside, that traces how booties have moved from cult
fetish to main stream acceptability.There’s a tan booty on the poster for the film that does not look like it
belongs to the originator and creator of Big Booties—Black girls! So, yea, I’m
sick of the whole big booty White girl obsession. It makes me feel like I’m wearing a dental floss thong. A friend of mine said there's a thin line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. And the line has been crossed-again!